IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter
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IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter Vol. 60, No. 3, September 2010 Editor: Tracey Ho ISSN 1045-2362 Editorial committee: Helmut Bölcskei, Giuseppe Caire, Meir Feder, Joerg Kliewer, Anand Sarwate, and Andy Singer Annual IT Awards Announced The principal annual awards of G. Fink Prize Paper Award, the the Information Theory Society 2003, and the 2004 Joint IT/ were announced at the 2010 COM Societies Paper Award, ISIT, in Austin. The 2011 Shan- and the 2007 Information Theo- non Award goes to Shlomo Sh- ry Society Paper Award. He has amai. The 2010 Wyner Award served as Associate Editor for goes to Toby Berger. The win- the Shannon Theory of the IEEE ner of the 2010 IT Paper Award Transactions on Information is the 2009 IT Transactions pa- Theory and served on the Board per on Polar Codes by Erdal of Governors of the Information Arikan. The winner of the 2010 Theory Society. He will give the Joint IT/ComSoc Paper Award Shannon Lecture at the 2011 ISIT is the 2008 IT Transactions pa- Shlomo Shamai Toby Berger in Saint Petersburg, Russia. per on coding for errors and erasures, by Ralf Koetter and Frank Kschischang. Five stu- The Aaron D. Wyner Distinguished Service Award recog- dent authors of ISIT papers received the 2010 ISIT Student nizes an “individual who has shown outstanding leader- Paper Award: Yury Polyanskiy of Princeton, Jayadev Acharya ship in, and provided longstanding exceptional service to, of UCSD, Yashodhan Kanoria of Stanford, Arya Mazumdar the information theory community.” Toby Berger, Professor of University of Maryland and Benjamin Kelly of Cornell. with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineer- Finally, the 2010 Chapter of the Year Award was presented to ing University of Virginia, has served in every major role of the Russia Chapter. the IT Society, including President (1979), Editor-in-Chief of the Transactions (1987–1989) and General Co-Chair of The Claude E. Shannon Award, awarded for “consistent and the 1977 ISIT in Ithaka, NY. profound contributions to the field of information theory,” is the highest honor of the IT Society. Shlomo Shamai joined the The Information Theory Society Paper Award is given annu- Department of Electrical Engineering at Technion in 1986, where ally to an outstanding publication in the fields of interest to he is now the William Fondiller Professor of Telecommunica- the Society appearing anywhere during the preceding two tions. He has co-authored over 170 journal papers. His research calendar years. The winners of the 2010 award is “Channel Po- interests encompass a wide spectrum of topics in information larization: A Method for Constructing Capacity-Achieving Codes theory and statistical communications. He is especially inter- for Symmetric Binary-Input Memoryless Channels”, by E. Ari- ested in theoretical limits in communication with practical con- kan, which appeared in the July 2009 IEEE Transactions on straints, multi-user information theory and spread spectrum Information Theory. This paper introduces a new phenom- systems, multiple-input-multiple- output communications sys- enon termed Channel Polarization and introduces a particular tems, information theoretic models for wireless networks and recursive construction of codes, namely, Polar Codes, that systems, information theoretic aspects of magnetic recording, exploits channel polarization through a successive decoding channel coding, combined modulation and coding, turbo codes algorithm. It shows that these codes and their matching de- and LDPC, in channel, source, and combined source-channel ap- coding algorithm achieve the capacity of any binary memory- plications, iterative detection and decoding algorithms, coherent less symmetric channel with decoding complexity O(n log(n)). and noncoherent detection and information theoretic aspects of Arikan’s paper has already spurred a very significant amount digital communication in optical channels. Dr. Shamai (Shitz) is of research on Polar Codes and applications thereof. an IEEE Fellow and a member of the Union Radio Scientifique Internationale (URSI). He is the recipient of the 1999 van der Pol Gold Medal of URSI, and a co-recipient of the 2000 IEEE Donald continued on page 3 2 From the Editor Tracey Ho Dear IT Society members, Issue Deadline December 2010 October 10, 2010 The highlight of this issue is the announce- March 2011 January 10, 2010 ment of the annual IT Society awards. June 2011 April 10, 2010 Warmest congratulations to the award winners for all your achievements! This is- sue is also the first under the newly formed Please submit ASCII, LaTeX or Word source files; do not editorial committee. There are exciting ar- worry about fonts or layout as this will be taken care of ticles in the pipeline for upcoming issues, by IEEE layout specialists. Electronic photos and graphics so stay tuned. should be in high resolution and sent as separate files. As a reminder, announcements, news and I look forward to your contributions and suggestions for fu- events intended for both the printed news- ture issues of the newsletter. letter and the website, such as award an- nouncements, calls for nominations and Tracey Ho upcoming conferences, can be submitted jointly at the IT Society website http:// www.itsoc.org/, using the quick links “Share News” and “Announce an Event”. Articles and columns that do not fall into the above categories should be e-mailed to me at [email protected], with a subject line that includes the words “IT newsletter”. The deadlines for the next few issues are: IEEE Table of Contents Information Theory Annual IT Awards Announced ................................................. 1 Society Newsletter From the Editor ............................................................... 2 IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter (USPS 360-350) is published quarterly by the President’s Column ........................................................... 3 Information Theory Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. The Historian’s Column . 4 Headquarters: 3 Park Avenue, 17th Floor, Golomb’s Puzzle Column: Seating Arrangements ................................. 5 New York, NY 10016-5997. Cost is $1.00 per member per year (included Golomb’s Puzzle Column: Infinite Sequences With Bounded in Society fee) for each member of the Overlap Solutions ............................................................. 7 Information Theory Society. Printed in the U.S.A. Periodicals postage paid at New York, IEEE Information Theory Society Board of Governors Meeting...................... 8 NY and at additional mailing offices. Event Report: Broadcast Channel Summit . 11 Postmaster: Send address changes to IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter, First IEEE African Winter School on Information Theory and IEEE, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854. Communications ............................................................. 12 © 2010 IEEE. Information contained in this 2010 International Symposium on Network Coding (NetCod 2010) ................. 13 newsletter may be copied without permission provided that the copies are not made or dis- Conference Calendar . 16 tributed for direct commercial advantage, and the title of the publication and its date appear. IEEE prohibits discrimination, harassment, and bullying. For more information, visit http://www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/ whatis/policies/p9-26.html. IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter September 2010 3 President’s Column Frank R. Kschischang I have just returned from beautiful sunny Austin, lists of committees and their membership, infor- Texas, where an enthusiastic team headed up by mation for authors, reviewers, conference orga- Benhaam Aazhang and Costas Georghiades orga- nizers, and much more. nized a fantastic Symposium on Information Theory. As usual, the Symposium featured an outstanding Of particular note and potential interest to all infor- technical program (organized by Michael Gastpar, mation theorists is the rapidly-expanding body of Robert Heath, and Krishna Narayanan), with stim- material filed online under the general heading of ulating plenary talks from Michael Jordan, Abbas “Resources” (www.itsoc.org/resources). Here the El Gamal, Tony Ephremides, and Ram Zamir. The Online Committee has gathered pointers to various highlight of the Symposium was the Shannon Lec- materials; for example, textbooks in information ture, entitled “Musing upon Information Theory,” theory and related fields, lecture notes and review and delivered by Te Sun Han. The Symposium once articles, and even a few recent (and not-so-recent) again featured a number of events organized by the doctoral dissertations. Members of the commu- Student Committee, including Round Table Research nity are strongly encouraged to contribute to this Discussions and a Panel Discussion on “Recipes for a Good Talk,” growing archive. For example, to post a link to a PhD dissertation, and the WithITS organized a very interesting event entitled “Yes, She a member would simply need to register for an account, log in, and Can.” I am already looking forward with eager anticipation to next then from the “Dissertations” page fill out a brief form accessed via year’s Symposium, to be held in Saint Petersburg, Russia. the “add new…” drop-down menu feature. — e — If you happened to miss the Shannon lecture or a plenary lecture from this year’s ISIT, or, indeed, from any of the ISITs since 2006, The Information Theory Society has an amazing web site (www.itsoc. you may be pleased to know that these have been recorded